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The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire
Nineteenth-century Britain could be seen as the first information society in history—for the simple reason that it accumulated knowledge from the far-flung corners of its empire faster than it could easily digest it. The British Empire presented a vast administrative challenge; by meeting that challenge through maps and surveys, censuses and statistics, Victorian administrators developed a new symbiosis of knowledge and power. The narratives of the late nineteenth century are full of fantasies about an empire united not by force or civil control but by information.
In The Imperial Archive, Thomas Richards analyzes the ways in which the Victorian organization of knowledge was enlisted into the service of the British Empire, as fields like biology, geography and geology began to function almost as extensions of British intelligence. Richards argues that the techniques invented for managing this information explosion established an enduring axis between knowledge and the state and also suggested a powerful new direction for the novel. He illustrates his argument by careful reference to a variety of institutions—above all the growth of the museum—and texts, including works by Rudyard Kipling, Erskine Childers, H.G. Wells and Bram Stoker.
In The Imperial Archive, Thomas Richards analyzes the ways in which the Victorian organization of knowledge was enlisted into the service of the British Empire, as fields like biology, geography and geology began to function almost as extensions of British intelligence. Richards argues that the techniques invented for managing this information explosion established an enduring axis between knowledge and the state and also suggested a powerful new direction for the novel. He illustrates his argument by careful reference to a variety of institutions—above all the growth of the museum—and texts, including works by Rudyard Kipling, Erskine Childers, H.G. Wells and Bram Stoker.
188 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 1993
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March 22, 2018
Empires function as deeply material things, spreading power of various sorts through all manner of settings. The British Empire, despite all the celebratory recent reclamations, was to a very large degree the product of oppression, alienation, dispossession and appropriation, with more than a little genocide thrown in – and to a large degree this was no different to any of the other great modern European empires. Thomas Richards’ engaging, if in places slightly obtuse, study explores not these relations of empire but its ideological and cultural image and power through discussion of four classic late imperial novels.
Richards’ image of empire and the Imperial Archive is a subtle one, arguing that “the archive was not a building, nor even a collection of texts, but a collectively imagined junction of all that was known or knowable, a fantastic representation of an epistemological master pattern, a virtual focal point for the heterogeneous local knowledge of metropolis and empire” (p11). The image is powerful, of an archive, of an institution that lacks materiality but has a profound material effect. Modern and fluid, a junction and a pattern, virtual but a thing of all that is able to be known this imperial archive is modern in the sense of being of the era of the rational and the empirical. Richard’s Empire and Richards’ Archive is, however, far from monolithic.
He paints a picture of an empire that is split between the drive to know, organise and control on the one hand and the threat of collapse and of replication and therefore a loss of power on the other. He does so through analyses of contemporary (as in historical) fiction. The opening chapter explores the space of empire, working through the trope of utopia, focussing on mapping and cartography as displayed in Kipling’s Kim as the actions of confident empire, and James Hilton’s Lost Horizon as the source of Shangri-La as fading imperial power. Kim in particular tells a story of benign empire controlling but not oppressing – and in doing presents a powerful Victorian popular image of empire, one that continues in some circles now.
This fantasy of empire as utopia, in Richards’ view, sits alongside a less obvious fantasy more grounded in the dominant scientific paradigms of the day as secure of form, but challenged by alien forms. Not surprisingly, then, he reads this image through Dracula as a distinctive type of monster, one that is self-creating – so this is not a Darwinian question of form, of gradual transformation, but of sudden change, where Dracula is the origin of a new species – he was transformed, mutated, and in doing so became the creator of the new. Crucial for Richards here is that this new thing was defeated by speed – information could travel faster than the vampire in its earth filled coffin, and as such traps could be laid to kill the undead – again, this is a confident empire. His counterpoint is the resignation to corruptions of form in J G Ballard’sThe Crystal World where an alien transformation of the world is accepted in a sense of resignation.
These fantasies of the success and power of empire sit alongside pessimism. For Richards the first strand draws on key scientific debates of the late 19th century, highlighting entropy as a gradual, irreversible and inevitable decline of coherence and energy. One of the things Richards does very well is build a sense of the key aspects of late 19th century intellectual life, especially key developments in science, of which continual refinement of entropy was one. In this discussion he calls on H G Wells’ relatively little known Tono-Bungay built around shifting access to forms of energy and the social organisation that accompanied them – which doesn’t sound like much of a novel, except it is by Wells! Here we see the British Empire a global destructive force, exploiting and extracting resources for its own advancement: Wells seems far ahead of his time (except that he was well aware of the debates around imperialism drive by late Victorian socialists and liberals. At the heart of this problem of entropy is the control of energy allowing Richards to buddy Wells up with Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow as the narrative of decline and failure.
Finally Richards to the empire’s last great fantasy and fear – the possibility that it is not unique, that its anti-empires, its enemies, also have sophisticated knowledge systems and archives. In this he returns to mapping, to invasion and Erskine Childer’s The Riddle of the Sands with the threat of German invasion (emerging in the early 20th century), the knowledge and information enemies have in their archives that as the double of the British archive, and the British obsession with non-expert knowledge. Again, the counterpoint is Gravity’s Rainbow as the clash of empires.
Richards, as would be expected of a literature scholar, uses fiction very well as the organising mode for this perceptive discussion of the fears weaknesses and challenges of empire as much as it is of empire’s myths of power. Crucially, he builds a rich and sophisticated cultural and intellectual history by contextualising these literary texts not in literary terms but in ideals and ideas of politics and science. In doing so he has produced a sharp cultural history of empire that reminds us that through all the confidence and bluster off late Victorian views of Britain’s empire, there remained a constant fear and perception of threat deeply embedded in the dominant culture. Admittedly, this is a specialist read – but one that is worth it.
Richards’ image of empire and the Imperial Archive is a subtle one, arguing that “the archive was not a building, nor even a collection of texts, but a collectively imagined junction of all that was known or knowable, a fantastic representation of an epistemological master pattern, a virtual focal point for the heterogeneous local knowledge of metropolis and empire” (p11). The image is powerful, of an archive, of an institution that lacks materiality but has a profound material effect. Modern and fluid, a junction and a pattern, virtual but a thing of all that is able to be known this imperial archive is modern in the sense of being of the era of the rational and the empirical. Richard’s Empire and Richards’ Archive is, however, far from monolithic.
He paints a picture of an empire that is split between the drive to know, organise and control on the one hand and the threat of collapse and of replication and therefore a loss of power on the other. He does so through analyses of contemporary (as in historical) fiction. The opening chapter explores the space of empire, working through the trope of utopia, focussing on mapping and cartography as displayed in Kipling’s Kim as the actions of confident empire, and James Hilton’s Lost Horizon as the source of Shangri-La as fading imperial power. Kim in particular tells a story of benign empire controlling but not oppressing – and in doing presents a powerful Victorian popular image of empire, one that continues in some circles now.
This fantasy of empire as utopia, in Richards’ view, sits alongside a less obvious fantasy more grounded in the dominant scientific paradigms of the day as secure of form, but challenged by alien forms. Not surprisingly, then, he reads this image through Dracula as a distinctive type of monster, one that is self-creating – so this is not a Darwinian question of form, of gradual transformation, but of sudden change, where Dracula is the origin of a new species – he was transformed, mutated, and in doing so became the creator of the new. Crucial for Richards here is that this new thing was defeated by speed – information could travel faster than the vampire in its earth filled coffin, and as such traps could be laid to kill the undead – again, this is a confident empire. His counterpoint is the resignation to corruptions of form in J G Ballard’sThe Crystal World where an alien transformation of the world is accepted in a sense of resignation.
These fantasies of the success and power of empire sit alongside pessimism. For Richards the first strand draws on key scientific debates of the late 19th century, highlighting entropy as a gradual, irreversible and inevitable decline of coherence and energy. One of the things Richards does very well is build a sense of the key aspects of late 19th century intellectual life, especially key developments in science, of which continual refinement of entropy was one. In this discussion he calls on H G Wells’ relatively little known Tono-Bungay built around shifting access to forms of energy and the social organisation that accompanied them – which doesn’t sound like much of a novel, except it is by Wells! Here we see the British Empire a global destructive force, exploiting and extracting resources for its own advancement: Wells seems far ahead of his time (except that he was well aware of the debates around imperialism drive by late Victorian socialists and liberals. At the heart of this problem of entropy is the control of energy allowing Richards to buddy Wells up with Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow as the narrative of decline and failure.
Finally Richards to the empire’s last great fantasy and fear – the possibility that it is not unique, that its anti-empires, its enemies, also have sophisticated knowledge systems and archives. In this he returns to mapping, to invasion and Erskine Childer’s The Riddle of the Sands with the threat of German invasion (emerging in the early 20th century), the knowledge and information enemies have in their archives that as the double of the British archive, and the British obsession with non-expert knowledge. Again, the counterpoint is Gravity’s Rainbow as the clash of empires.
Richards, as would be expected of a literature scholar, uses fiction very well as the organising mode for this perceptive discussion of the fears weaknesses and challenges of empire as much as it is of empire’s myths of power. Crucially, he builds a rich and sophisticated cultural and intellectual history by contextualising these literary texts not in literary terms but in ideals and ideas of politics and science. In doing so he has produced a sharp cultural history of empire that reminds us that through all the confidence and bluster off late Victorian views of Britain’s empire, there remained a constant fear and perception of threat deeply embedded in the dominant culture. Admittedly, this is a specialist read – but one that is worth it.
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January 18, 2019 "No one office ever administered the British Empire; lacking any standing imperial bureaucracy, it was overseen by a sort of extended civil service recruited from Britain's dominant classes."
Everybody knows that all empires, however ambitious they may be, cannot be total. An empire is never complete, nor can it be, even if imperial expansion feverishly pursues its own totalising mission. But as Thomas Richards' fascinating book The Imperial Archive demonstrates, Victorian Britain's new imperialist agenda was particularly self-aware about its own geopolitical incompletion. Britain, according to Richards, knew that its empire was partly a fiction, a fabrication, a kind of conquest which must be constantly reinforced ideologically so that it appeared all-encompassing. Thus for Richards the archive – the recording and transmission of information from the British Museum to newspapers to fiction – becomes a key site of imperial control, offering the empire a symbolic unity that it in truth didn't possess. British imperialists developed complex map-making technologies, created the census, produced numerous statistical analyses of its colonies – the British Empire was a paper-shuffling enterprise, utilising information to enact civil control.
Richards brings these ideas to bear on a handful of nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels which differently register the British Empire's imperial archive. From Rudyard Kipling's high-imperial Kim to Thomas Pynchon's end-of-empire Gravity's Rainbow, Richards reveals how fiction simultaneously participates in and pushes back against empire's fictional claims to symbolic unity. His analysis of Bram Stoker's Dracula is especially fun: Darwin's evolutionary theory domesticated all that was alien. This not only secularised the idea of the unknown in everyday life, but it also banished the monstrous from fiction. Victorian fiction, Richards argues, is curiously uninterested in monsters. But Stoker turns this on its head. By reinventing the Dracula myth, he transforms Dracula into a postcolonial mutant that threatens the imperial core, a parasite who arrives on England's coast with the very rats and flies that Britain brought with them on their ships. The mutant cannot be easily tamed by Darwinian science.
Everybody knows that all empires, however ambitious they may be, cannot be total. An empire is never complete, nor can it be, even if imperial expansion feverishly pursues its own totalising mission. But as Thomas Richards' fascinating book The Imperial Archive demonstrates, Victorian Britain's new imperialist agenda was particularly self-aware about its own geopolitical incompletion. Britain, according to Richards, knew that its empire was partly a fiction, a fabrication, a kind of conquest which must be constantly reinforced ideologically so that it appeared all-encompassing. Thus for Richards the archive – the recording and transmission of information from the British Museum to newspapers to fiction – becomes a key site of imperial control, offering the empire a symbolic unity that it in truth didn't possess. British imperialists developed complex map-making technologies, created the census, produced numerous statistical analyses of its colonies – the British Empire was a paper-shuffling enterprise, utilising information to enact civil control.
Richards brings these ideas to bear on a handful of nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels which differently register the British Empire's imperial archive. From Rudyard Kipling's high-imperial Kim to Thomas Pynchon's end-of-empire Gravity's Rainbow, Richards reveals how fiction simultaneously participates in and pushes back against empire's fictional claims to symbolic unity. His analysis of Bram Stoker's Dracula is especially fun: Darwin's evolutionary theory domesticated all that was alien. This not only secularised the idea of the unknown in everyday life, but it also banished the monstrous from fiction. Victorian fiction, Richards argues, is curiously uninterested in monsters. But Stoker turns this on its head. By reinventing the Dracula myth, he transforms Dracula into a postcolonial mutant that threatens the imperial core, a parasite who arrives on England's coast with the very rats and flies that Britain brought with them on their ships. The mutant cannot be easily tamed by Darwinian science.
April 6, 2022
Essential for understanding the connections between knowledge and power, information and empire
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews